Jeremy Hunt: 'We must beef up out-of-hours A&E consultant cover'

There are too few consultants working overnight in A&E, the health secretary
has said, after figures showed only five consultants are on duty overnight
in accident and emergency departments across the entire country.

Jeremy Hunt said the numbers of consultants in emergency departments overnight must be "beefed up". While most hospitals employ an on-call consultant who can be contacted between midnight and 8am, the vast majority do not have any actually working on site during these hours.

Just five NHS trusts in England ensure a consultant is on duty at A&E during the overnight shift.

The rest are staffed by junior doctors, who are often hesitant to disturb their senior colleagues when they are on call.

Many of the slightly more experienced staff supervising the junior medics are said to be locums.

Asked about the figures, Mr Hunt said: “Most A&E departments have an on-call system at certain times of the day, and I agree we need to beef that up. We need more consultant cover at the times A&E departments are the busy.”

Mr Hunt said there needs to be more cover in A&E at the evenings and weekends. Research has shown patients have a heightened chance of dying in those periods because of a lack of senior doctors. Around £125m of extra government spending will go on hiring more consultants, Mr Hunt said.

Of all the NHS hospitals that responded to a Freedom of Information request by a national newspaper, the only ones that said they employed a consultant overnight were Brighton and Sussex, Imperial College in London, University Hospitals of North Staffordshire, North Bristol and the Pennine Acute Hospitals in Greater Manchester.

At the other 87 NHS trusts that provided a response, the last consultant on duty finishes his or her shift at either 8pm, 10pm or midnight.

The figures also showed that the vast majority (90%) of NHS hospital trusts employed only one consultant in A&E during Saturday and Sunday daytimes.